Jesse Eisenberg has made his most significant debut to date.
There is a delicious irony at the center of “The Debut,” Eisenberg’s third feature as a director, which world premiered at the Telluride Film Festival: it is a film about a nobody who attacks a bit part as if it were the role of a lifetime — and it arrives as one of the fall’s genuine best picture contenders, ready to make Oscar darlings out of Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti.
Rebecca Keagan of NBC News moderated the Q&A with Eisenberg, Moore and Giamatti. It was Giamatti’s first time seeing the film.
Call it Eisenberg’s “Black Swan” by way of “Whiplash” and “Waiting for Guffman,” the whole fever dream staged inside a faux musical and relocated to a New Jersey rec center. Moore plays Mona Friedman, a meek housewife who hasn’t sung in front of anyone since church choir and is unexpectedly cast in a community-theater production — then transforms into a zealous method actor willing to wage war over a marginal role. Giamatti is Jerry, the tyrannical director billed, without irony, as the biggest name in New Jersey community theater. It is funny, then feral, then unexpectedly moving and it confirms that the filmmaker who won Kieran Culkin an Oscar with “A Real Pain” knows exactly how to build a showcase around actors.
